Is anyone else absolutely seek of seeing the word ‘condemn.’
The Football Association ‘condemn’ this. The politician ‘condemns’ that. This will not be ‘tolerated.’ Calls have been made to ‘put an end’ to this.
If you’re reading this on the morning after the England football team came so close to winning their first major trophy in 55 years, this word is littered around social media. If you go onto Google’s news search tool and simply type in ‘racism’ you’ll see this word everywhere.
What are we actually doing?
Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka were all subject to racist abuse after they failed to score in the penalty shootout which resulted in Italy lifting the Euro 2020 trophy last night. All young laddies who wouldn’t have slept easily with the pressure football comes with anyway before all this nonsense. That Saka is only 19 years of age, and he had the bottle take a penalty with the weight of a whole country’s expectations on his shoulders. I wonder how those that have to hide behind a computer screen to gee someone abuse would fare in this situation. The same people who, by the way, would be plastering their highlight reel over social media and gloating about their country being the champions of Europe if they had kicked the ball towards the other side of the goal. I wonder if these people celebrated Raheem Sterling opening the scoresheet against Germany, one of the finest results the England national football team has seen since the turn of the century.
This isn’t breaking news though… I know this instance, in particular, has only been brought to light as early as this morning but, and I say this with a gut-wrenching feeling in my stomach, it’s starting to become inevitable. It’s probably one of the first things many people realised after the result sank in. We knew this was going to happen. We knew these would be the headlines this morning. It’s been a recurring theme in football all season.
This is why we shouldny accept the word ‘condemn’ from politicians or governing bodies anymore. We’ve heard that word before and it is starting to become meaningless.
Another phrase I keep seeing about this issue is that these people ‘are not fans.’ I don’t think this is getting us anywhere further forward. The problem is that these people are fans. These are people with tickets, they enter our turnstiles and are invested in teams all across the UK (not just England’s national team). These are people that follow football and genuinely feel this way towards people of a certain race, so much so that they’ll go on their phone and send vile messages to them when they make mistakes. The narrative can’t be that these people are not within the true community of football… they are. Let's not separate them from football, this gives them an extra hiding place. If they wear the jersey, watch their team on the tele, put dosh towards it, they ARE fans.
Politicians have told us this morning that these people should be “ashamed” of themselves. How are we meant to put them to genuine shame if we’re also giving them a way out?
We need stricter identity verification on these digital platforms so these people can be held accountable. Make them stand up, in the middle of the crowd, facing all the repercussions regular citizens do outside the digital world and let us see their bottle. They were quick to crucify these young lads that took a penalty last night so why not (truly) stick them in front of thousands of people as well and see how they get on.
The buck canny be passed about either. I know we’ve heard this all before about these companies needing to do more and politicians needing to act but we seem to be kicking the can down the road here. We’re beginning to sound like a broken record. Millions of people have spoken, if those in power don’t respond then what use is a democracy?
Stop saying the word ‘condemn’ and get a shift on man.
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